Hartford Steps Closer To Recapturing Riverfront

Take Me To The River

May 08, 1999|By MIKE SWIFT; Courant Staff Writer

Newcomers see with fresh eyes. They question, instead of accepting the immutable fact.

In 1979, newly arrived insurance executive Rory O'Neil looked out from the 15th floor of the Travelers Tower toward the lazy, opaque bend of the Connecticut River. He thought and he thought, and he realized he was one of a few people in the city who actually could see the river.

``I would see this beautiful river and then I would go down to the ground floor -- not an indication that this thing was there,'' he said.

O'Neil had lived near Chicago, and knew that city's lakefront doorstep. He wondered how Hartford could wall itself off from the river that had spawned it, and he began to think: Why couldn't Hartford recapture its waterfront?

Twenty years later, the plans that O'Neil and other river advocates began to frame when Jimmy Carter was president are about to be fulfilled.

This summer, the organization that O'Neil, Jack Riege, Tyler Smith and others helped create, Riverfront Recapture Inc., will complete a pedestrian platform that will allow people to walk from downtown Hartford to the Connecticut River for the first time in 50 years. The platform will bridge the dike and the highway that severed the city from its waterfront.

Anyone will be able to walk from East Hartford to Hartford over the Founders Bridge, looking toward the downtown skylineor staring down at the water from a series of parapets on the bridge.

``It will be like walking from Brooklyn Heights to Manhattan'' over the Brooklyn Bridge, O'Neil said. ``It will be one of the great entries to Hartford.''

As Riverfront Recapture prepares to celebrate its greatest milestone, O'Neil, 68, and Riege, a 77-year-old Hartford lawyer, have passed leadership to a younger generation.

Both men stepped down from prominent positions with the organization last year: Riege after 14 years as the only president Riverfront Recapture had ever had and O'Neil after 17 years as its only chairman.

``I felt the same way that I did at my daughter's wedding,'' O'Neil said. ``It was something that was good to have happen, but it was something that was wrenching.''

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Back when O'Neil and The Travelers Insurance Cos. helped organize a seminar at the Old State House in 1980 on how Hartford could reconnect to the river, there were many reasons to think the job was impossible.

Start with the physical barrier. I- 91 was a thrumming monstrosity on the east side of Hartford, and initial plans for the highway's reconstruction called for an even higher barrier than already existed, with high, looping flyover ramps that would have forever blocked any chance to reconnect to the river.

The Travelers, which was looking to support a high-profile civic project, became a key supporter of the riverfront effort. But the city, Hartford leaders told river advocates, was not equipped to carry out a development plan that would take a generation to complete.

Instead, advocates decided to launch a private, nonprofit organization. Riverfront Recapture came into being in 1981.

By the end of 1982, local corporations had donated $600,000, and the money had been used to complete a development plan for Hartford's riverfront. The physical process of reconnecting to the river was starting.

Then came a second barrier: bureaucracy.

The only way to get back to the river, Riverfront Recapture believed, was to go over the top of the highway. To do that, the organization had to persuade the state Department of Transportation to lower I-91, not raise it as the agency originally planned. The DOT said it couldn't be done; Riverfront hired engineers to prove that it could.

Despite the early disagreements, Riverfront's founders now agree the reconnection could never have happened without the support of the DOT.

``They were always willing to listen, and once they came around to the realization that this had merit, they made it happen,'' O'Neil said.

Yet even as the DOT agreed in 1984 to restore public access to the river, Riverfront began to wrestle with a tangle of local, state and federal agencies that had to approve any work within the river's flood plain.

Approvals took years. At one point, a state agency declared that poison ivy and ragweed were indigenous species on the Hartford riverfront and could not be disturbed.

The agency eventually backed off, but in dealing with government approvals, ``everything took tremendous amounts of time,'' Smith said. So the vision moved forward, with construction beginning on a public park at Charter Oak Landing in 1989, and the reconstruction and lowering of I-91 starting in 1992.

Riverfront Recapture wanted not only to reconnect to the river, but to get people interested in investing in land near the riverfront. Once Hartford's front yard, the east side of downtown had become its neglected back alley.